regex
Technology & Computing abbreviation · Programming
| Stands for | Regular expression |
|---|---|
| Categories | Technology & Computing |
regex stands for Regular expression, a programming abbreviation.
A pattern language for matching text, used to search, validate and replace strings, such as ^\d{5}$ for a five-digit ZIP code. Almost every programming language, text editor and command-line tool supports regexes.
Example: The regex for order numbers is ^ORD-\d{6}$, so lowercase prefixes fail validation.
Usage notes
Mathematician Stephen Kleene described regular languages in the 1950s, and Ken Thompson built them into the QED editor and later grep. Also written regexp; the plural is regexes. Flavors such as POSIX, PCRE and JavaScript differ in features like lookbehind. Badly written patterns can backtrack catastrophically; one caused Cloudflare's global outage in July 2019. A well-known joke says that solving a problem with a regex leaves you with two problems.
Related abbreviations
More programming abbreviations
- PRNG – Pseudorandom number generator
- PTAL – Please take a look
- pwd – Print working directory
- PyPI – Python Package Index
- QA – Quality assurance (software)
- RAII – Resource acquisition is initialization
- REPL – Read-eval-print loop
- REST – Representational state transfer
- RNG – Random number generator
- RoR – Ruby on Rails
- RPC – Remote procedure call
- SAFe – Scaled Agile Framework